Cultural Diversity and Human Rights: a propos of a minority educational reform

historical and status inequalities, many of which are co-terminous
with different and unequal educations and qualifications as well as
the divisions characteristic of stratified, unequal labour markets.
By encouraging and legitimating the division between vocational
and academic education, and thus future occupational
destinations, without any reference to its long history as the site of
the production of educational inequalities, the right to education
undermines the universality of the right. Thirdly, it sustains the
fiction of the unequal distribution of ability, merit and educability,
specifically in relation to higher education, ignoring the patterned
distribution of the cultural capital of students and the symbolic
violence of curriculum and pedagogy (Bourdieu and Passeron,
1977). In this context, research in the sociology of education has
demonstrated, time and again (eg Halsey et al, 1961; Karabel and
Halsey, 1977; Halsey et al, 1997; Lauder et al, 2006) that
educational outcomes are broadly reproductive of existing social
inequalities. The capacity for higher education is a classed, raced
and gendered one. The universal right to education is thus
profoundly paradoxical, in that it appears to embed, promote and
legitimate educational inequality.

As such, the right to education is located in, at best, a social
democratic discourse of equality of opportunity, rather than
embracing the more progressive egalitarian aim of equality of
outcome. Article 28, indeed, promotes the notion of equality of
opportunity uncritically as a central guiding principle. It thus
invokes a minimalist version of equality, shifting universality from
institutions, practices and experiences to modalities of accessing
opportunities. Equality of opportunity to access education, though

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